Abstract: The Berkeley Free Church (South Campus Community Ministry), 1967-1972, Richard York, Pastor, operated a service ministry to
the Berkeley, CA, Telegraph Ave. area transients, runaways and hippies. Services included a referral switchboard, counseling,
health care, crash pads, and free food. Support came from area merchants, local churches, and the Episcopal and Presbyterian
denominations. The Church and its clergy were involved in all the radical and social justice issues of the late 60's including
local Berkeley issues, campus riots, and People's Park; peace and draft resistance issues of the Vietnam War; and radical
church renewal in the mainline Protestant denominations.

Collection is open for research, except for 3 items and interviews captured on audio tapes by Harlan Stelmach for his dissertation.
Access restricted until 2025.

Publication Rights

Copyright has not been assigned to The Graduate Theological Union. All requests for
permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the
Archivist. Permission for publication is given on behalf of The Graduate Theological
Union as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the reader.

By the mid-1960s, Berkeley, California had become a center of the "hippie" culture
drawing large numbers of transient youth to the area called South Campus, especially
Telegraph Ave. A small group of area merchants and clergy of local churches, interested
in reconciliation and conflict resolution, conceived the idea of ministry to the needs of
these persons.

The South Campus Community Ministry was incorporated in May 1967. Richard
L. York, recent graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and soon to be
ordained in the Episcopal Church, was hired as Director. The SCCM quickly emerged as both
an alternative social service agency and a "Free Church" as it was called by the kids on
the street ("free" designating "hippie").

The Free Church worked out of a house in the
South Campus area which was also where York and his family lived. In the early months,
with minimal staff, particularly Glee Bishop, and some volunteers, the Free Church began
its ministry by reacting to the immediate needs of the street people. From this grew
services such as: a switchboard; counseling and crisis intervention for problems and
issues such as runaways, the draft, problems with drugs, and more; providing crash pads;
and providing free meals. Eventually, the Free Church helped develop "spin off" projects
which took over these services, such as the Berkeley Runaway Center, the Berkeley Free
Clinic, and the Berkeley Emergency Food Project.

As the services grew, and the
ministry expanded, so did support from such agencies as the Episcopal Church and the
Presbyterian Church. Anthony Nugent, a Presbyterian minister, and John Pairman Brown,
"Theologian in Residence", an Episcopal minister, were added to the staff, and the
volunteer pool expanded to include both people from the street, and well-meaning church
people who wanted to help.

The ministers of the Free Church continued to move in radical
directions both theologically and politically, locally and nationally, participating in
all the radical and social justice issues of the time: peace issues including Vietnam
protests, draft resistance, and conscientious objectors; student protests, both at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the local seminaries, particularly Pacific School
of Religion; race issues, particularly the Black Panthers; Berkeley city issues involving
social services, the police, housing, and riots; and People's Park. The staff were also
involved in issues of radical church renewal, locally doing alternative liturgies for the
Free Church and general South Campus community, and nationally confronting established
churches and denominations.

During this period, too, the Free Church, especially
John Pairman Brown and Emily Brown, was involved in the Free Church Publications. This
included various books published by John Pairman Brown, manuals and handbooks on the
switchboard and collective ideas, a yearly calendar, and "Win With Love: A Directory of
the Liberated Church in America".

Stelmach describes the tensions inherent in the
work of the Free Church and its leadership: "It seems clear that from the start there
existed two models for the ministry that came to be called the 'Berkeley Free Church.'
First, there was the social service and reconciliation model. The second was the rapidly
emerging alternative church and advocacy model. These two models, though not inherently
or theoretically irreconcilable, were constantly in tension with each other. . . . [T]he
Free Church would move in the direction of an alternative church--a church that advocated
the perceived rights, needs and values of its [hippie] constituency over against an
established society and church that were increasingly coming under attack from this
constituency. Therefore, the Free Church always had two constituencies for whom, or two
bases from which, it operated: the church and the world or religion and political action.
. . . The tensions...which defined the Free Church's constituencies and base in the
oppositional youth (hippie) culture's politics and life styles, for the sake of church
renewal, is the basis for understanding the evolution of the Free Church from a hippie
church to a political cult." (Stelmach, Harlan D.A. The Cult of Liberation: The Berkeley
Free Church and the Radical Church Movement , Pg. 18)

By 1970, controversies and
difficulties began to emerge. The staff split over styles, directions, and emphases for
the ministry which culminated in Anthony Nugent resigning and setting up the separate
Submarine Church. The more politically involved the staff became, the more controversial
the ministry became to its more conservative supporting constituency in the established
churches and denominations. The Free Church experienced increased police harassment,
negative media, and eroding support.

Throughout 1971-72, the continued and growing
contradictions, political, theological, and organizational, resulted in a fragmented
ministry lacking in cohesion, definition, direction, and effectiveness. There was a
growing disparity between the Board of Directors and the Switchboard people, by now the
only service left, as the Switchboard staff moved toward a collective model. This caused
more tension between the ideas of the Free Church as alternative church or as political
service agency.

It is now early 1972: "The nature of the transient youth in the youth
ghetto, to which the Free Church was 'called' to serve from its inception as SCCM, still
continued to be lower class, less educated, and older young adults. It was not a group
from which the Free Church desired to recruit its lower level staff or volunteers. These
older youths were basically free floating transients. But perhaps out of tradition, some
altruism, some continued notion of conflict resolution, or maybe because they were funded
to do 'corporal acts of mercy,' the Free Church still made efforts to serve the
transients by its switchboard or its rejuvenated food program. One of the last programs
the Free Church 'spun off' was its free food program . . . However, by late 1971 the
transients were only the 'objects' of the service ministry. The motivation was 'charity'
not self liberation. Therefore, the Free Church's paternalism plus the nature of the
street transient helped to reimpose the clientele relationship in the social service
ministry." (Stelmach, Pg. 283)

There is a breakdown of the Left and the radicals
generally. At the Free Church, there is a further breakdown of the organization, staff
relations, and personal lives. The Browns resign from the staff, and York continues as
the only remaining staff person. The switchboard is closed. York entered a period of
evaluation and the attempted development of a new direction for the ministry.

In
September 1972, York took a sabbatical, and the Free Church, for all practical purposes,
ceased to exist. The energy and optimism York expresses in the poem above gives way to
the pain expressed here: "The solitude and doubt which invades all of human existence
began to be experienced as a depressing reality by many of us who were working in the
Movement (secular and religious) in the late 60's. We do not need, except in our
ceremonies, to recite again the litany of witnesses: assassinated, murdered, immolated,
gassed, shot, imprisoned, napalmed, beaten. All of us bear scars, on our bodies or in our
souls, of lost vision, dashed instant-revolution hopes, smashed stardom, soul poverty and
powerlessness. . . . The 'Free Church/Submarine Church/Liberated Church Movement' was
real, as real as was the secular movement of the 60's, but certainly not separate from
it. And that in part is our problem. . . . [i]n fact the Movement and the Radical Church
are two fountains from the same source. . . . Both have suffered from a kind of 'movement
eschatology', in which we lived, talked and acted as though the revolution would be over
tomorrow, just after this one last street demonstration. . . . For the radical church
movement, it was fed additionally by a theological eschatology, which was not thought
through deeply enough. . . . We ran like lemmings into the maw of the World Pig,
expecting that we would choke it and kill it overnight, and instead it began to chew us
to bits as our ripped hopes and bodies evidence." (Richard L. York,
Radical
Religion:
Vol. 1 no. 1 (Winter 1973) pgs. 23-25.)

Scope and Content

The collection consists of working files, correspondence, records, minutes, flyers, pamphlets, posters, newspapers and clippings,
and published material. Also included are files of the Submarine Church, a group which broke off from the Berkeley Free Church.
There are some personal family files from the pastor Richard York, including a set of letters from a Civil War Union soldier
describing the Battle of Fredericksburg. There is a great deal of duplication in this collection, the
same material being found under more than one files series. Much duplicated material can
be found under the Richard L. York Files and the Berkeley Free Church Files.

Arrangement follows the order created by Harlan Stelmach while he was working on his dissertation.

Custodial History

This collection went from Richard L. York to Harlan Stelmach for Stelmach to research for
his GTU dissertation,
The Cult of Liberation. Stelmach writes in his Preface: "I
realized the Free Church story needed to be told as one example of how religion and
politics had been combined. I proposed this to York and he agreed to give me access to
his personal archives. After six months spent in organizing the archives, my research
began in earnest." (pg. vi.) The order of the collection comes, therefore, from
Stelmach's organization of the files for his research. He also did many of the file
folder headings. Throughout the files, there are red pencil underlinings and circles made
by Stelmach in the course of his research. After completion of the dissertation, the
collection then went to the Community for Religious Research and Education, Berkeley,
California, a GTU student related group of which Stelmach was a part. This was the
organization which published
Radical Religion, a journal that "grew out of
the ashes of the Berkeley Free Church." In the end notes for the dissertation, Stelmach
sites all material from this collection as "CRRE Historical Archives" indicating that the
depository of the material in the Community for Religious Research and Education. When
the CRRE ceased to function, around 1977, the collection was transferred to the DataCenter, a
non-profit interest research library and information center, in Oakland, California. The
DataCenter held the collection as received in its original containers until deeded to the
GTU Archives in 1989.

Separation Note

Given to the Oakland History Room, Oakland, CA Public Library: 1 ft. of material,
1965-66, on the Peralta Villa housing development, the Peralta Improvement League, the
Lockwood Improvement League, and discrimination in the Oakland public schools, and
newsletters, "Flatlands", and "Lockwood Ledger".

Article from the San Francisco Chronicle, "Vietnam Tactics in Berkeley", with photo, 5/22/69 1969 May 22

Richard L. York Files, Organizations

Size: ca. 1 ft.

Location: 2/E/3-2/E/4

Arrangement

No order

Box 7, Folder ff 15

Berkeley City Council Meetings,
1971

Folder ff 16

Berkeley City Council Meetings,
1972-3/73

Folder ff 17

The Bridge (Social Justice Newsletter),
1970-71

Folder ff 18

Berkeley Citizens Committee on Public Safety,
1971-73

Folder ff 19

Church Society for College Work,
1969-73

Folder ff 20

Interchange, Committee of Social Justice, Archdiocese of San Francisco,
1973

Folder ff 21

Berkeley Runaway Center,
1970-72

Folder ff 22

Bay Area Switchboards,
1969-70

Folder ff 23

Switchboards, other than California,
1968-70

Folder ff 24

Weathermen, Sacramento

Folder ff 25

ACLU,
1968-70

Folder ff 26

Berkeley Alternative Services Coalition,
1971

Folder ff 27

Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic,
1968-69

Folder ff 28

Free University,
1970

Box 8, Folder ff 1

Joint Strategy and Action Committee,
1970-72

Folder ff 2

Community of the Agape

Folder ff 3

Experimental Ministries Committee, United Presbyterian

Folder ff 4

Berkeley Coordinated Drug Services,
1971-72

Folder ff 5

Christian World Liberation Front

Folder ff 6-7

Ecumenical Ministry to the Haight-Ashbury, 409 House

Folder ff 8

Episcopal Peace Fellowship,
1971-73

Folder ff 9

Ecumenical Peace Institute,
1971-72

Folder ff 10

EPI Indochina Newsletter, 1973 (Issues1-3)

Folder ff 11

Fellowship for a Free Ministry,
1971

Folder ff 12

Glide Foundation,
1967, 1971

Folder ff 13

Glide Urban Center, "Survival Resource List"

Folder ff 14

Grapevine, Newsletter of Joint Strategy and Action Committee,
1970-72

Folder ff 15

Newman Hall, Holy Spirit Parish,
1973

Folder ff 16

Order of Maximilian,
1970

Folder ff 17

Probe, Newsletter of Christian Assoc. of S.W. Penn.

Folder ff 18

San Francisco Conference on Religion and Peace,
1971

Folder ff 19

Ecology and Politics Newsletter,
1970, United Ministries in Higher Education

Folder ff 20

Student Christian Movement, England,
1973

Folder ff 21

Sather Gate Inter-Church Council,
1969-73

Folder ff 22-28

Episcopal Diocese Urban Department,
1967-73

Folder ff 29-30

Episcopal Diocese of California,
1972-73

Folder ff 31

Unsorted

Richard L. York Files, Wedding Book,
1973-74

Size: ca. 5 in.

Location: 2/E/4

Box 8, Folder ff 32-77

Richard L. York Files, Wedding Book

Scope and Content Note

ff 44 lists the contents of the proposed book. The working title: "The Liberated Wedding:
A Free-People's Guide to Marriage Celebration." This is a collection of published
articles, pamphlets, information, and material on which to base the book, arranged in the
subject categories listed in the contents. There are no drafts. Of interest is the file
on the Jane Fonda-Tom Hayden Wedding, ff 58. The wedding was performed by Richard York.

Box 9, Folder ff 1-36

Richard L. York Files, Wedding Book (continued)

Scope and Content Note

Of interest: ff 21-22, Berkeley Free Church wedding

Richard L. York Files, 3-Ring Binders

Size: 2 in.

Location: 2/E/4

Box 10, Folder ff 1-2

3-ring binder: Interseminary League for Academic Freedom,
1967

Folder ff 3-6

3-ring binder:

Green Flag Poetry

People's Park Chronology,
1967-69

Youth Revolt and the New Left

People's Conference: A Gathering of Tribes, Berkeley,
1969

Box 11

Richard L. York Files, Pamphlets,
1961-68

Size: 2 in.

Location: 2/E/4

Scope and Content Note

Pertaining to various subjects of interest to York during those years, including: the
Holy Spirit, New Left, SDS, ecumenism, political satire, spirituality, theology,
intentional community.

Richard L. York Files, Family History

Size: 2 in.

Location: 2/E/4

Correspondence

Box 12, Folder ff 1

9/1845, Mary Rohrer, Ann Rohrer, Susan Rohrer

Folder ff 2

2/1851, Ann Rohrer, Sarah Ann Bishop

Folder ff 3

9/1853, G. or J. Wolfersberger

Folder ff 4-12

9/1860-10/1864, 11 letters from George L. Freet to Susan Wolfersberger (The majority of the letters are written during the Civil War. George
was in the 126th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers. ff 9 describes the Battle of Fredericksburg.)

This is a sampling. Some discarded due to extensive water damage and mold. See also
correspondence and orders in "Win With Love" Directory files.

Folder ff 31

Bills Submitted to South Campus Community Ministry,
1970-72

Folder ff 32

Addressograph, San Francisco,
1970-72

Folder ff 33

Calendar Finances,
1971-72

Folder ff 34

Ads,
1969-71

Folder ff 35

Morehouse-Barlow Publishers,
1971-72

Folder ff 36

John Knox Press,
1971-72

Folder ff 37

Announcement for Journal, "Radical Religion",
c. 1973

Free Church Publications: Directory, "Win With Love: A Directory of the Liberated Church in America",
1969-71

Size: 6 ft.

Location: 2/E/6, 2/F/1-2/F/2

Additional Note

The directory was edited by Emily Waymouth Brown. In the introduction to No. 1, 1969 it
states: "This directory is being put out by the Free Church as a service to our friends,
known and unknown, in America and overseas. We have not operated with a fixed description
of the type of groups to be included; it has evolved as we discovered what was going on.
The outfits here listed are all described from their response to our questionnaire and
their own literature... Our ideal is to list ecumenical Christian groups with a concern
for service on one hand, and liberation on the other --and to encourage the formation of
more." In later editions, groups which were radical, political, or service oriented but
having no relation to Christianity or religion, were also included.

Scope Note:

The directory files seemed to have been organized in three sections; 1) files of groups,
churches, and organizations responding with their questionnaire and literature, 1969-70;
2) correspondence about the directory, other Free Church Publications, and general
correspondence requesting information, 1969-72; and 3) files of groups, 1970-71 (with
some 1969 mixed in). Some sampling was done, but a majority of the collection was
retained. The collection has some water damage. One foot of material was discarded due to
mold. These were files of groups, 1970-71: most of California, and some of Minnesota,
Mississippi, Missouri, and Montana.

Box 18, Folder ff 1

Correspondence and Forms (form letters and questionnaire forms)

Folder ff 2

Win With Love, No. 1,
July 1969

Folder ff 3

No.
2, November 1969

Folder ff 4

No.
3, March 1970

Folder ff 5

No.
4, October 1970

Folder ff 6

No.
5, June 1971

Folder ff 7-69

Directory Files,
1969-70

Arrangement

Arranged by organization alphabetically

Folder ff 70-76

Directory Correspondence,
1969-72

Arrangement

Arranged by state, then no order

Alabama - District of Columbia

Box 19, Folder ff 1-29

Directory Correspondence (continued)

Florida - Overseas

Folder ff 30-70

Directory Files,
1970-71

Arrangement

Arranged by state, then overseas by country, then organizations in no order